Ottney: Yule do better

On Dec. 17, city officials unveiled the first of 55 planned “You Will Do Better in Toledo” signs, which will be installed at city entry points over the next few weeks.

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The black and white road signs are modeled after the original display, which debuted 101 years ago on Dec. 17, 1913. That one topped Valentine Theatre and featured the slogan spelled out in lights.

“This sign demonstrated the viability and vitality of this great city 100 years ago, a city with a Downtown that was booming, where entrepreneurism flourished,” Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins said afterward.

“As you come off the turnpike and you’re coming into Toledo, perhaps this is something that will capture the attention of those who are not familiar with Toledo,” he said. “You will do better in Toledo. It was proven 100 years ago and we’re going to prove it in 2015 and every year there forward.”

John Amato, owner of Jupmode, a Perrysburg-based screen-printing company whose flagship T-shirt design features the slogan, was among those who advocated for the installation of the signs. He attended the unveiling and said it’s “surreal” to see the slogan beside the street.

Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins and other city officials and community members look on as the first of 55 planned “You Will Do Better in Toledo” sign is unveiled near the intersection of Reynolds Road and Heatherdowns Boulevard Dec. 17. Toledo Free Press Photo by Sarah Ottney

“It’s just really neat to see so many people get behind the slogan, because it really is about the city as a whole, the pride we have in the area, the optimism we have right now,” Amato said.

The slogan has organically dovetailed into Toledo Region Branding Initiative’s official slogan, “It Matters Where You Make It.”

“Everybody talks about how a city has to have an identification. It’s all part of marketing and labeling,” Collins said. “To market, you have to label. To label, you have to be able to capture a difference and this is the best way to do it.”

Collins also hopes the message makes its way to Chrysler, which is deciding the future of Jeep Wrangler production in Toledo.

“[We want to] demonstrate to Fiat Chrysler that it matters where you make it,” Collins said. “In January I’ll be going up to Auburn Hills to speak with Mr. [CEO Sergio] Marchionne and this is the type of message I’m going to give.”

The idea for the signs evolved last winter after Amato, with Dustin Hostetler of Grumpy’s and Adam Sattler of The Ottawa Tavern, met with Collins to discuss the possibility of rebuilding the original sign. Instead, Collins suggested the welcome signs.

He announced the initiative during his Dec. 9 State of the City address. Afterward, he said he thinks the signs represent a step in the right direction.

“We’ve been a government that’s been reactive instead of where I really wanted to be and that was to be more proactive in terms of giving us a different direction,” he told me. “I’m hoping in 2015 we can take those dynamic steps to redefine Toledo.”

Toledo Free Press Design and Illustration by James A. Molnar

Not everyone is a fan of the slogan.

“I hate to be the one to say this but ‘You will do better in Toledo’ is incredibly lame. Better than what?” a Facebook friend posted.

“Respectfully, what is the point? There is no discernible plan that I can find to help do better here. Are the signs magic?” a Twitter follower asked.

Yes, an actionable plan is needed. But basic civic pride is a good foundation to build on. I love that residents and community leaders are embracing Toledo for what it is while dreaming of what it could be.

This is a time of year when magical thinking is embraced and disbelief suspended.

On Jan. 2, the sparkle of the season will begin to fade for another year and we’ll all have to face the new year and its challenges head on.

The holidays bring a uniquely mixed bag of emotions. Many local households will be full of joyful reunions, twinkling lights, overflowing tables and bountiful gifts. But thousands are without food, clothing, housing or are missing a loved one. A family in Sylvania is burying their 19-year-old son, Zachary Wagenhauser, killed in a car crash Dec. 16. Firefighter Jamie Dickman’s widow is preparing for their son’s first birthday on Christmas Day.

Amanda Aldrich and her Resolve Toledo “sisters” are bracing themselves for more bad news from their fertility specialists and preparing to spend the holiday season surrounded by well-meaning but often hurtful friends and relatives. Some of these women have bravely shared their stories with us in these pages.

Toledo Free Press does better in Toledo because of our readers. Because of our advertisers.

Because of you.

Thank you for reading and happy holidays.

Sarah Ottney is Editor in Chief at Toledo Free Press. She can be reached at sottney@toledofreepress.com or on Twitter at @sarahottney.

Concerts celebrate Ottawa Tavern’s fifth anniversary

“The Ottawa Tavern is the heartbeat of both Adams Street and the Toledo music scene,” Matt Klein of Bikini Babes and Silent Lions said in an email. “I’ve always been impressed by their dedication to supporting unique local talent and hosting the best touring bands to visit our city.”

Sattler

The bar will celebrate its fifth anniversary with a three-day concert, starting 10 p.m. Aug. 1.

“I think in bar and restaurant terms, it’s pretty impressive,” said manager Adam Sattler. “More than us being a bar and a restaurant, it’s more about the fact that we’ve been doing original music for five years.”

Each band performing during the three days has a connection to the bar in some way. Some have been playing at the tavern since its opening.

The party will include the first ever performance by Gunshots or Fireworks and the last by Bikini Babes. The schedule of bands includes GOLD, NRR, Katie’s Randy Cat, The Miracle Vitamins and Gunshots or Fireworks on Aug. 1; goLab, The Zimmerman Twins, Bikini Babes, Silent Lions and People Being Human on Aug. 2; and The Fight Within, Jack and the Bear, Thirty Three & 1/3, React and Mike Corwin on Aug. 3.

“The folks at the OT have such a sharp eye for talent, both local and national, and support the bands and artists in ways very few bars/venues do,” said Russ Courtney of The Miracle Vitamins said in an email. “I sometimes refer to Adam from the OT as the ‘patron saint of Toledo music’, which I still think is appropriate. In the last five years, the OT opened up a new channel for expression for Toledo’s so-called ‘indie’ artists and truly changed the artistic environment in our town.”

This event will be free, like most of their shows have been for the past five years.

“I think by doing free shows, we can still maintain that we are a neighborhood bar,” Sattler said. “Hopefully what the bar means to Toledo is it is a venue for people to see up-and-coming regional and national bands. Toledo’s in such a great spot. There’s a lot of opportunities for us to bring in some of those touring bands and pair them with local bands.”

Mark Metzger of The Fight Within said that The Ottawa Tavern stands out among other bars in Toledo.

“I think a huge part of it would have to be the staff,” he said in an email. “Adam has been nothing but incredible to us. [The staff continues] to make that place such a great venue and bar. I think I can speak for the rest of the band when I say that we’re honored to be a part of their celebration.”

Sattler said the bar tries to stay plugged into the community. The venue is currently hosting a “Political Party” every Tuesday. The event is an informal meet and greet of Toledo mayoral candidates followed by food and entertainment. Opal Covey will be at the venue on Aug. 6 and councilman Joe McNamara on Aug. 13.

“Any bar can just open up and sell people liquor,” Sattler said. “We like to be involved in the arts [and] music community.”

The bar was opened five years ago by Tom Baird, who enjoyed the original Ottawa Tavern when he was in college. He wanted to recreate the bar in UpTown.

“This bar is five years old, but the name is I don’t even know how many years old,” Sattler said.

Columbus bands swarm Toledo tavern

Central Ohio bands invade Toledo when five Columbus bands take the stage at Ottawa Tavern on Feb. 24 and 25.

INVASION is the brainchild of Adam Sattler of Ottawa Tavern and Stephen Pence of Kobo, a Columbus venue. Last weekend, Toledo groups The Forest, The Miracle Vitamins, GOLD and Thirty Three & 1/3 played in Ohio’s capital city in support of the Columbus Music Co-op. This weekend, Alert New London, Dirty Girls, This Is My Suitcase, She Bears and Old Hundred will play at the Ottawa Tavern. Netherfriends, a Chicago-based artist, and The Dub Starlings of Toledo will join them.

“We were all becoming friends but everybody was coming through at different times and we decided [INVASION] would just be a good time for all of us,” Sattler said of the groups’ decisions to form a collaboration. Other cities have approached Sattler about doing similar swaps, building what Sattler hopes will become a “more connected Midwest music scene.”

There is no cover, but a $5 donation to the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo is suggested. Shows begin at 10 p.m. Feb. 24-25 at Ottawa Tavern, 1817 Adams St., Toledo. Visit otavern.com to learn more.

The Faux Paus emerge from ‘Basement’

It’s an exciting time for Toledo folk-rock band The Faux Paus. Not only have the three members been touring extensively outside their home area, they have a new EP, “Basement,” comprised of high-quality recordings of three original songs.

The group recorded the tracks —“A Village,” “Camper” and “Dustin Hoffman” — with a producer in Detroit during the past few months, and now the CD will be available for purchase at Allied Record Exchange.

“Those three songs are done and mixed and mastered, and we’re getting professional CD packaging and stuff like that, and really going all out for this,” said Hannah Fritch, vocalist, guitar player and keyboardist.

In addition, “Basement” will be available on iTunes, marking the first time the group’s music can be downloaded there.

To celebrate, The Faux Paus will perform at a CD release party Nov. 25 at The Ottawa Tavern, sharing the bill with fellow local favorites the Dirty Damn Band and Lightning Love.

“We’re really excited, because Adam Sattler from the OT has been trying to get these three bands together for a long time,” Fritch said. “And we finally are playing together.”

Vocalist/guitar player Amanda Thompson added, “This is the first show where all three bands are female-led bands that we’ve played at. So, it’s kinda cool, and these are two bands that we’ve seen, we’ve heard a lot about, but we’ve never played a show with either of them.”

The show will be the latest in a string of performances for the Paus, who have also been touring extensively the past few months.

“We’ve gone out for three-to-five day runs. We just were in Youngstown a couple weeks ago, a couple weeks before that we were playing festivals in D.C. and Atlantic City and Philadelphia. We’ve been keeping busy on the road,” Thompson said.

But for now, the EP is the band’s primary focus. Fritch said it’s interesting how, as a band like theirs evolves, recording music becomes as much a snapshot of who the group used to be as who it is now.

“I think those three songs really do get across a big part of what our sound is, or who we are as songwriters. But at the same time, it’s kinda funny because it was several months ago that we recorded it, and even longer before that that we even wrote these songs and kinda perfected them.

“And so now that it’s time to release those three songs, I feel like we’ve evolved slightly more and we’ve taken a kind of darker sound that isn’t really so much reflected in that EP,” Fritch said.

“I take that as a good sign that we’re still growing,” Thompson added.

Thompson said producing something that looks and feels professional is an effort to give back to the people who have supported the group as it’s grown.

“Just to give our fans something that looks nice,” she said. “Pretty much anyone who comes to our shows, it’s like they only have heard us live, for the most part.

“We don’t have a lot of recordings — we have some old recordings that we did a year ago. But for the most part, a lot of the people who come out to see us have only seen us live, they don’t have any recordings. So it’s just gonna be nice to give them something that looks nice, it sounds good and is kinda reflective of how we want to treat our fans,” Thompson said.

The band said the album is being sold at Allied on a “pay what you want” basis.

“You know, give us $1, give us $2, give us $5. Because we want people to have this. We do have to make our money back. But at the same time, if we only can make a buck on you, that’s cool,” Fritch said.

The band will continue to work primarily on recording in the months to come.

“We’re setting up a lot of the recording stuff in our apartment and trying to really perfect that, just to have more, because we really have come a long way,” Fritch said. “So we’re gonna be focusing on recording for a little while; I think that’s the most important thing.”

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Local music

Trio of bands feels resurgence in local scene

When Mind Fish frontman Dean Tartaglia returned home to Toledo from Ohio University this summer to do his internship and play shows with his band, he was not anticipating much out of the local music scene.

“I had no expectations going into the summer,” Tartaglia said to Toledo Free Press Star. “Even in early June I had little expectations, and now strangely enough it’s August and I have a lot of expectations for Toledo in the future within the next couple years.”

The seeds for those changed expectations were planted in April, when Mind Fish was on the bill at Frankie’s Inner City with GOLD and The Fight Within for Tropic Bombs’ first show.

“[Mind Fish] came up to Frankie’s in Toledo and played a gig with us, and we ended up having Dean actually come onstage with us to promote a film we were doing,” said GOLD vocalist/guitarist Zach Ruetz. “We made him wear this rabbit mask and, like, jump around with a poster of our movie. That was right after we met him.”

Mind Fish

Tartaglia and his band forged a friendship with GOLD and Tropic Bombs that night, one which has led to a productive summer in Toledo for all three groups. On Aug. 27, Mind Fish, GOLD and The Strong Talk will play a free show at the Ottawa Tavern.

Growing scene

Rather than wearing a rabbit mask, Tartaglia has since been playing saxophone with GOLD in addition to jamming with Mind Fish and his other pursuits. This summer, Tartaglia was an intern for The James Poure Consultancy, which is consulting for Creadio founder/CEO and TEDxToledo curator Will Lucas.

TED — which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” — started 26 years ago in California and is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Tartaglia said that Lucas commented on how there is a growing arts scene in Toledo he has never seen before.

“It’s just cool because it’s real easy for someone within the scene to know that ‘Yeah, we have a good scene’ or whatever, but when you have someone completely removed noticing it, that’s when you kind of get the idea that maybe something bigger is going on than you could have even expected,” Tartaglia said.

Adam Sattler, who does booking, marketing and promoting for the Ottawa Tavern, said the venue’s attendance keeps improving and that touring acts making stops in Toledo often comment on the positive response they get from locals.

“The other thing that I see is sort of a disappearing of a generational gap,” Sattler said. “Some of these older guys that have been in the music scene for a long time — Jimmy Danger, Dave Piciutto, guys like that — come out and support the younger bands, and the younger bands go out and support these guys. I think that more than anything as far as camaraderie goes, I’ve noticed that in the last, say, six months or a year.”

Tartaglia has noticed support on nights which typically do not draw big crowds, nights like the Tuesday he played saxophone at Manhattan’s.

“It was my friend’s 21st that night, and I brought my sax and was playing and it was, like, ass-packed in there by midnight on a Tuesday night,” Tartaglia said. “I was absolutely shocked that’s even happened on a Tuesday in Toledo.”

DIY effort

Sattler said more local bands are producing and promoting their material.

“GOLD and Mind Fish, they do it right,” Sattler said. “Just with this show, they didn’t wait for us as the venue to create a Facebook event. They did it, and they want to self-promote. The difference between the bands that promote themselves and [the bands that] don’t is one band plays to 200 people and the other plays to 50.”

Tartaglia credits that promotion as a big factor in how this summer has gone for Mind Fish, GOLD and Tropic Bombs.

“It’s the energy of the promotions going into the show because I’ve known a lot of bands that have a lot of great energy and bands that draw well over the past some-odd years,” Tartaglia said. “I know GOLD and Tropic Bombs — I’m sure they’d say the same about us — just the amount of promotion that goes into it, it’s hyped up. There’s a lot of buzz and we all know that, but we’re still real dedicated, real professional about what we’re doing.”

Beyond the promotion, GOLD used Garage Band to self-produce its 2010 six-song EP.

“It’s a pretty simple program, but you can move really fast with it,” GOLD bassist Tom Martin said. “That’s not a plug for Apple, though. I’m glad we did it ourselves because of the problems with some of the early bands me, Zach and Jacob [Czerniejewski were in]. When we went into a recording studio, you’re on the clock and it’s not a very comfortable atmosphere, and the technology has become more affordable.”

That affordability is one of the pluses Sattler highlighted for local musicians.

“In a city like Toledo, a band can get a record made for half the cost of what they can do it anywhere else, and you’ve got people doing it,” Sattler said. “I know GOLD recorded theirs on their own. Thirty Three and 1/3 just put an album out. I know that bands aren’t having to pay what they used to, and so I think Toledo’s really good for that. And not to mention, we’re surrounded by five great music markets that these bands can head out for a weekend and do a show in Columbus, or Cleveland or Detroit.

“Toledo’s a great place for a band to start.”

Irons in the fire

Mind Fish, GOLD and Tropic Bombs all have future, full-length albums in the works. While each band has its own distinctive sound, they all try to make the live shows as fun and energetic as possible.

“I think that’s what the three of us bands have in common,” said Ruetz, who at 24 has been playing music with Martin and Czerniejewski for eight years. “It’s all really positive stuff, and I think we need that right now in these times, in the recession and everything. People want to be entertained.”

“We all feel this resurgence, which is what we wanted out of the music scene,” Wayton said. “I feel like a lot of the people — like the fans and friends and stuff — are having a good time. A lot of them I think just embrace it because it takes them back to the old days with Promise of Tomorrow and stuff like that from what they’ve told me. It’s great.”

Tartaglia said Mind Fish plans to play in 15 different cities during the next two months with the ultimate goal being to do local spotlights on 89X. The band is aiming for a January release of its new album and will soon launch its new website — themindfish.com — as well as a Kickstarter.com project to try and produce hard copies of the new record.

“I just hope it keeps spreading exactly how it is right now, just little by little,” Tartaglia said. “I don’t think I can ask for anything more.”

Mind Fish, GOLD and The Strong Talk will perform a free show Aug. 27 at the Ottawa Tavern, located at 1815 Adams St. in Toledo. The show starts at 10 p.m. In addition to the concert being Tartaglia’s 21st birthday, Mind Fish will release two new songs off its upcoming album that show attendees can pick up for any price they choose, including for free. The band will also have new, $10 T-shirts available, while GOLD may play some new tunes as well. For more information, call (419) 725-5483, or visit http://otavern.com.